Ross, if you have not done so already I should buy a lottery ticket, good luck that they pointed at your co-ordinates exactly at the right time. Its a great image.

Any idea what the fuzziness is in the tail about a quarter distance from the comet head? It looks like aircraft trails as they begin to dissipate in the atmosphere. It must be a photographic effect. It shows up better on the negative version.

Want to image without getting your telescope out? Well this is real armchair astronomy and you get to hone your IRIS skills to boot.

Ross's post about the BRT came at an opportune time since I am wanting to get to grips with IRIS but don't have many decent images to play with. I took up the offer to try out the BRT and you can see what I ended up with on the Gallery. It was a couple of weeks before my image arrived and a day and a half to process it with much assistance from Ross but there was a lot of learning in that time so it will not take very long next time around - M100 is sitting there waiting to be processed.

If you like what you see then why not have a go. You will need to get the access details from Ross and we should have a workflow sheet ready soon to help guide you through the ins and outs of processing. The BRT scopes are going to have some annual maintenance anytime soon so there won't be any new images for a few weeks. This need not stop you from looking around the site and perhaps downloading some of the tens of thousands of images that are already there. There is even some basic processing available on the site, so have a go!

Good luck

Last edited by bholmes on Fri Jun 14, 2013 9:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, it's certainly a good way of practising your image-processing skills.
The data is rather different to what you'd get from a DSLR: the three colour-planes arrive as separate FITS files which need to be aligned and combined to form the colour image - and there's practically no light-pollution to remove!

The servicing team from the University of Bradford is now working on-site at Mount Teide, and they have been cleaning a year's accumulated muck off the front of their C14 OTA today:http://ed-brt.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/cl ... ptics.html
Amazing that my recent M17 image was taken through that lot!

I'm now able to answer Bernie's question about the diagonal streaks on my BRT Cluster Camera image of comet PanSTARRS from the end of May:

bholmes wrote:Any idea what the fuzziness is in the tail about a quarter distance from the comet head? It looks like aircraft trails as they begin to dissipate in the atmosphere. It must be a photographic effect. It shows up better on the negative version.

I've since found that these artifacts are visible to some extent on all long-exposures from the Cluster Camera, both before and after its lens was cleaned during the servicing visit in June. And they appear on images taken with both Clear and Colour filters, so it must be something inside the lens, or the camera's sensor (or its glass window).

Now we know that these effects can be mitigated by the use of FLAT-field calibration, but there are currently no "flats" available from this camera. However I've just been experimenting with creating a "synthetic flat" from a number of long-exposure deep-sky images. I went through the BRT image archive and chose 23 of different targets which didn't contain any very bright stars or extended objects and used the "Make a Flat-field" process in IRIS to normalise them and form a median average: